


bright red vacancy signs (blaring in your eyes)

by friendly_ficus



Category: Dimension 20 (Web Series)
Genre: Angst, Gen, Growing Up, filling in the timeskip, less about the poisoned chalice of fame and more about the dented gatorade bottle of friendship, you know when you’re a teen and you don’t know who you are yet. that.
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-20
Updated: 2019-11-20
Packaged: 2021-02-16 01:42:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,676
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21499771
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/friendly_ficus/pseuds/friendly_ficus
Summary: A list of what Fig knows about herself: she takes care of Gilear, her friends are the most important people in her life, and she's the best goddamn bass player there's ever been.(The list of what she doesn't know is much, much longer.)
Relationships: Figueroth Faeth & Gorgug Thistlespring
Comments: 13
Kudos: 99





	bright red vacancy signs (blaring in your eyes)

**Author's Note:**

> me, writing this fic: i just care about fig so much okay

Bastion City isn’t entirely unfamiliar; Fig’s seen it on the crystal a hundred times, draped with the trappings of wealth and fame and success. It’s different without the filters and lighting tricks, seems somehow colder. The puddles on the street don’t gleam with any kind of poetry, they just look like dirty water. Fig leans her head against the window of the Thistlespring van and watches the buildings pass by. She thinks about the argument in the kitchen with her mom, about yelling that she could do this _on her own, without anyone bothering her._

Sandralynn had looked sad, and Fig had felt. Well, she’d felt—y’know, that’s not important anymore. It doesn’t matter, it’ll work itself out, she can call on the crystal tonight. She can fix it, she’s Fig Faeth, daughter extraordinaire. Her head aches a little, up around her horns.

The van goes over a bump and from the driver’s seat Gorgug says, “Hey, we’re here.”

“Cool. Right, cool. Hey,” and she turns away from the window to look at him more fully. 

Gorgug’s got a miniature tin flower pinned to his hoodie, his hair’s messy from repeatedly running his hand through it on the drive. His hands are placed precisely on the steering wheel and he’s watching the road diligently. He doesn’t look back at her, but makes a _hm?_ sound. 

“Are you, um, nervous or anything?”

“Sure, a little. I was actually more worried before we left.” He gives a little laugh. “I thought you’d change your mind and, like, pick a better drummer to come with you.”

“Gorgug, _no,_ you’re my—I know I can be pretty hard to read, but you’re one of my best friends, man. I wasn’t gonna just dump you for some band kid who thinks they’re hot shit just because they know some extra techniques for fills or something.”

He grins at that, just like she knew he would. Sometimes she puts sentences together just to watch other people smile at her. 

(And sometimes she gets on her crystal with a club owner at the other end of the line and says, “Look, we killed the briefly-ascended dragon guy who wanted to grind everybody under his heel, we can make some kickass music I swear.” Well, once. She’s done that once, but they’re here now, so it worked.)

Her hands shake through the soundcheck and she fidgets, adjusting Doreen’s hairnet on her leg and picking at her hair. She’s on edge as people begin filtering in to this club she knows from interviews, as she’s standing on the stage that launched a hundred damn careers; Gorgug clears his throat and picks up his sticks, tilting his head in question. 

Fig snags her pick and feels the comforting weight of the bass in her hands. She nods and Gorgug _tap tap tap taps_ his sticks together. 

The thing about the performance that puts you on the map, it turns out, is that sometimes you just feel like you’re gonna be sick at the start of it. As the music builds and they power through their songs, though, Fig forgets everything that might go wrong. It’s just this moment, it’s just the stage and the cheering crowd and Gorgug nailing a solo, it’s just the music and the lights and the strings vibrating against her ruby-red pick.

\---

Lola Embers sends two interns running with a glance at their first meeting in one of the towering buildings that make up the Bastion City skyline. Fig’s spent the entire elevator ride up here trying not to seem like an Elmville kid, trying not to gawk at the views of the metropolis below. She’s Fig the Rockstar right now, and Fig the Rockstar doesn’t care about fancy skylines, she cares about the _music,_ okay. 

At her side Gorgug has had no such instincts, snapping pictures with his crystal whenever the urge strikes him. (Later, Fig notes, she has to ask him to send her the pictures too. Maybe he’ll add them to the group thread.)

Lola spells out contract terms and Fig leans into her instincts, going through the stack of papers and making sure she’s not signing any souls away. When they’re all satisfied with the terms, she picks up the pen and signs the damn contract _Figueroth Faeth_.

She calls Gorthalax after the meeting, giddy, and he tells her he’s so proud of her. Not for the first time the bitter thought, _you don’t know anything about me, how the fuck can you be proud,_ threatens her mood but she shoves that aside. Fig the Rockstar isn’t bitter or jaded yet, Fig the daughter has worked through all her issues surrounding her parentage, and whichever of those she’s being right now is bubbling with happiness. 

In the van on the way back to Elmville, Gorgug asks, “Are you... okay right now?” 

Fig realizes she’s been tapping the window for a while, that her face has gone from pleasantly cool against the glass to unpleasantly lukewarm. Stopped at a red light, Gorgug is looking at her.

“Yeah,” she says, “yeah, dude. This is gonna be great!” 

He nods and grins again and sometimes Fig puts together sentences just to watch people smile at her. Sometimes the sentences are even true.

\---

Lola sent them back to Elmville to put a first album together, to write the songs that are gonna shape the trajectory of the rest of Fig’s life; so Fig makes a couple lifestyle adjustments, no big deal.

There are shows coming up in Bastion City and there’s so much music to write that eventually she gives up the charade and outright stops going to class. Then she stops going to bed, heads to Gilear’s when her mom won’t stop reminding her about it. There’s the album to write, there’s so much that it needs to say and it’s all she wants in the world, isn’t it? It’s all she wants in the world. 

(When she’s working out a chord progression, she’s not even acting as Fig the Rockstar. She’s just letting it swell through her brain, letting it flow from her hands like hellfire.)

Gilear gives her plates of ham and crackers between his hours at Aguefort’s and she spends four straight days with her bass and a pen, writing and writing and writing. 

She sends Gorgug snippets at all hours, asking _how does this feel_ and _the drums would kick in here, is that good?_ He replies with a thumbs up or a smiley emoji, sends back clips of himself hitting his sticks against whatever happens to be in the vicinity to give her an idea of various tempos. 

On the fourth day, Fabian kicks Gilear’s door off its hinges. The _thud_ of the wood against the far wall brings Fig into the living room, a spell building in her throat before she recognizes him. They stand there for a moment, Fig looking at the place the door used to be and Fabian taking in the tangle of her hair around her horns, the ink smudged on her face. 

“Hey,” he says, drawing it out in that way he does when he’s not sure what to say next. “I just, uh, happened to be in the neighborhood.”

“You’re gonna replace Gilear’s door, right? Because you have to do that, you broke it.”

“Right, of course. Cathilda probably knows how to fix doors.” Fabian shakes himself from wondering if maids know how doors work and says, “Look, come with me.”

“... okay? I’ve gotta get back to the album though—”

What seems like no time at all passes, and they’re sitting in a booth at Basrar’s. Fabian’s messing around with his ice cream, carving off small bites but also just sort of smushing it around in his bowl. 

He looks up at her and sighs. “Look, I mean this in a cool way,” he starts.

“Of course. We’re the two coolest people in the group, bar none.” He smiles when she says it. Sometimes Fig puts sentences together—

“Right, so this comes from a place of coolness. _I_ didn’t wanna bother you, but Kristen and The Ball were worried, you know how they are. Adaine said you were fine and that she’d know if something was wrong because of the whole ‘oracle thing’, but the rest of us were getting a little _concerned_ about you.”

Fig, sleepless and fueled by the first real sugar she’s had in four days, pulls on that old adventuring charm and grins. “I’m good, I’m fine. Hey, Gilear hasn’t been home that much the past few days, is it true about him and your mom — ?” 

And just like that, she doesn’t have to make any more conversation. She scribbles down a lyric on a napkin while Fabian _calmly_ and _clearly_ expounds on the trials he is enduring. 

\---

Time passes and Fig pulls back from the writing a little bit, most of the songs are pretty worked out and Fabian hasn’t fixed Gilear’s door yet so she doesn’t want to risk the apartment taking any more damage from concerned friends. She calls Kristen a couple times to let her know how things are going, but Kristen’s pretty busy building houses in the swamp and that’s really important to her, so Fig doesn’t wanna interrupt. She texts Adaine back instead of leaving the notification blinking on her crystal. She asks Riz to investigate Porter. She calls her mom and listens to her say stuff about parenting and growing up and responsibility.

Lola starts getting her and Gorgug invitations to parties to build a little buzz, places with other musicians. Once in a while there’s karaoke, it’s sort of fun. Fig’s really good at this, good at switching to Fig the Rockstar to talk music or Fig the Adventurer to tell stories of valor.

Between one party and the next Fabian calls her and asks, “Hey, could you see if you hear anything about _Aelwen_ at any of these parties?” 

And Fig says sure, sure, of course, I can ask around about her if you want. Those conversations always end up with her raising a glass of something and toasting the death of Kalvaxus, somehow, and never get her anything _useful._ And then something in these gatherings seems a little spoiled, because she starts getting bored with them and starts failing Fabian and she can’t—how can she call up Fabian and say, “Hey, you know that one thing you asked me to do, turns out I can’t do it.” So she doesn’t.

And that’s fine.

\---

Fig dreams about Kalvaxus sometimes, towering above them and surrounded by corpses. She sees Riz digging his teeth into dragonflesh and remembers the heat of the fire breath, the metallic tang of blood in the air. She feels like she’s back in her body looking down at Penelope and Dayne, stooping to pick up the cheap crown. Fig raises it above her head and begins lowering it and; she wakes, sweating, the moment before it touches her head.

Gorgug’s bed is empty when she rolls over to look at it and for one moment she starts to panic before she hears his voice, faintly from the tiny balcony attached to their hotel room. All she can see is his silhouette in the light from the city. He’s got his crystal up to his ear.

“...and then you’ll start, to feel real glad,” he sings softly, clearly in response to whoever’s on the other side of the call. “Yeah, love you too. Sorry for waking you up. No, I’m good, I’m gonna go back to sleep.”

By the time he’s back in the room, Fig has rolled over and is faking sleep again.

\---

“Seriously, there’s nothing on Porter. There’s nothing to find out about this guy.” Riz’s voice gets quieter as Fig pulls the crystal away from her ear.

She’s angry, she can’t get the last song right and she isn’t sleeping well, she keeps thinking about her house on fire and her mom and Baxter in the flames and every other possible danger and she can’t pull on a disguise and head to the hospital to blow off some steam because she’s miles from home and it would fuck up tomorrows schedule and she hasn’t told anyone about any of this because it’s not a big deal, everyone’s got problems. Everyone’s got problems, right? Don’t they? Please, she can’t be the only one that has problems.

Fig brings the crystal back to her ear and interrupts Riz’s pointless update: _"Well maybe if you were a better detective, you'd see that something's wrong!"_

There’s that distinct silence that Riz gets when he’s putting something up on his mental conspiracy board before he ends the call. Fig’s crystal goes dark.

Five seconds pass and Fig looks toward the balcony where Gorgug’s turned to look at her with that worried look he gets and she can’t, she can’t stop fucking things up. She can’t find anything about Aelwen and she can’t get the song right and Riz is probably mad at her now and Gorgug was out there talking to Zelda, that conversation probably got ruined too. 

Fig grabs the nearest jacket that’s slung over the one hotel armchair and runs out the door, double speed. Nobody loves her, nobody in the world loves her, how could they when she doesn’t even know who she’s gonna be each day. 

Her crystal buzzes once and she notices belatedly that she’s holding it so tightly that her hand aches. Her skull throbs and she figures her horns are gonna get longer _again._ She pulls on the jacket and finds that it’s Gorgug’s, that her hands are swimming in the sleeves. Above her, it starts to drizzle.

**best detective**

_fig, are you._

_are you doing okay?_

**Fig**

_dont try to solve me right now riz_

_im busy_

Fig shoves the crystal into one of the giant pockets in the jacket and wanders the city until she’s soaking wet, right down to her cool boots.

\---

“Everything sucks,” Fig tells her mom’s voicemail. “I mean, everything’s fine or whatever, I’m safe and Gorgug’s safe and Lola says the next leg of the tour is gonna be broadcast to crystals. It's, it's gonna be really great.” 

Outside the diner she’s posted up in, the rain is coming down in sheets. Her hair is unpleasantly damp on her neck as she contemplates her plate of waffles. She can’t quite summon the energy to be Fig the Rockstar or Fig the Adventurer or Fig the Good Daughter. 

When she says “Love you, mom,” her voice sounds inexcusably uncertain and small. Her head aches. The waffles have gotten cold.

“Hey kid,” someone says from her left shoulder. “Mind if I pull up a stool?” 

Fig looks up and her eyes catch on the horns surrounded by a mass of dark curls. The tiefling woman gives a friendly smile and something in Fig eases, so she gives a sharp nod. There’s no point in pulling up some persona right now, not when she’s eating cold waffles and dripping on the linoleum floor.

“You’re Figueroth Faeth, right? The bass player? I love your music.”

“Thanks,” Fig says moodily into her iced tea. The other tiefling orders coffee and toast. 

It arrives with the clink of a butter knife on the ceramic plate. Fig sees the callouses on the woman’s fingers and the edge of a tattoo on the underside of her wrist. It’s something with scales and something clicks in the back of her mind, something about rock music and fire and a sound that pushed people back on their heels and—

“Oh shit,” Fig says, “I have your poster on my wall.”

Jane Picks, lead guitarist of _The Ninth Circle_ and formerly rising star (now very much risen) in the Solisian music scene, raises her coffee mug in salute. 

“Someday I’ll have yours, kid,” she says. 

It’s surreal, to be talking to the musician behind songs like ‘Devil’s Daughter’ and ‘Prince of Bones’ and dozens of other tracks that Fig had cranked up in her room the summer her life started to fall apart. They talk for two hours about music and songwriting and kicking an audience in the teeth with your sound. 

Eventually Picks says, “You keep wincing, kid, your horns still growing in?”

Fig nods miserably; the headache twinges unpleasantly and never seems to go all the way away. 

Picks nods, “When mine started growing I wouldn’t leave my bed. That shit sucks, Figueroth. Give me a call if it gets _really_ bad and I’ll see about casting Healing Word through a crystal.” 

“Seriously?”

“Yeah, of course. Thanks for the conversation,” the guitarist says, sliding to her feet. She pays both of their tabs and tips the waitress, and then Fig’s sitting alone at a diner counter with Jane Picks’ number scribbled on a receipt.

Outside, the rain has stopped. Fig makes her way back to the hotel and Gorgug pulls her into a hug that lifts her off her feet.

“We were worried,” he says, and she sees thirty-four notifications on her crystal. 

“It was raining,” she offers like that’s some kind of explanation, and Gorgug nods. 

\---

That night, Fig dreams that she’s sitting in Basrar's Soda Fountain surrounded by her friends, and the prom crown keeps falling in her eyes. Eventually she tosses it over her shoulder and it shifts weirdly in her peripheral vision before vanishing. Kristen tells some kind of joke that she doesn’t quite hear, but she throws back her head and laughs with everyone else. 

What wakes her up is the sound of Gorgug muttering in his sleep, and she rolls over in her bed just in time to see him thrash awake from a nightmare. 

“You wanna talk about it?” she asks him. 

“I usually text my parents,” he whispers.

“Okay.” There’s quiet while he taps out a message on his crystal. Fig thinks.

“You wanna go up on the roof?”

“What, why?”

“I dunno, it’s probably pretty cool up there. It was supposed to get clear after the rain.” It’s three in the morning, this idea was stupid, Gorgug’s gonna say no—

“Alright,” and he starts getting up. She snags their drinks out of the minifridge for something to do while he gets his shoes on.

On the roof, Fig taps her plastic bottle of non-copyrighted electrolyte replenishing red liquid against Gorgug's blue one. His crystal lets out the first strains of the only slow song they've got, _When you feel a little mad-_

"Hey, mom and dad," he says, laying back against the hotel roof to stare at the stars.

Fig texts Gilear so she isn't visibly snooping on the Thistlesprings.

**Fig**

_everything ok w/ you gilear_

**Lunch Dad**

_I burned my tie in the toaster yesterday morning. That’s the third one this week._

**Fig**

_0.0_

_wait how_

She opens another thread and asks Lola to fast-track a couple ties to Gilear's garage. Something that won't show yogurt stains. Maybe a print. She looks out at the city surrounding them. After the rain, everything looks a little bit slicker, a little shiny.

\---

At another party, during another bust for Abernat-information gathering, Fig’s trapped in some long boring conversation about the Nightmare King when Jane Picks slings a friendly arm around her shoulders and says, "Come on, let's find some better company. Some of these kids wouldn't know music if they sold their souls for it." She laughs and Fig laughs along with her. 

One of the elves makes an affronted noise and puffs up like he’s gonna start something.

Picks turns on him and her eyes glint with some kind of fire, sharp, and Fig thinks of the poster on her old wall, of the devil herself pulling fire from her guitar for a hundred thousand screaming fans. 

In the time it takes to blink, Fig’s been shuffled behind a shoulder and Picks looks like she does on stage, dramatic and untouchable. Around them conversations are stopping, the air getting charged and unpleasant.

“That was a polite way of saying ‘fuck off,’” Fig chimes in. “Next time she’s gonna use Hellish Rebuke.”

The guy blinks and opens his mouth to keep talking but Picks fully turns her back on him and pulls Fig away with her.

“Your drummer around, Figueroth?” she asks as they walk away, “Anybody here to watch out for you kids?”

Fig looks around for a minute and sees Gorgug palling around with some other drummers. He looks up and catches her eye, disengaging with the group and heading over.

They proceed to ditch the party and jam in the basement, Gorgug playing his sticks against crates and barrels and the walls while Fig teaches Picks the opening bars of ‘F*** Yeah (We Killed The Dragon),’ the single they’re about to release. It feels good, to play and put away the expectations for a while. Even though it’s not perfect, even though she let Fabian down and she hasn’t talked to Riz in a couple days and she’s not sure who she’s pretending to be right now, it doesn’t feel like everything sucks.

\---

Fig goes home and helps her mom and Jawbone move out of the places they’ve strangely both almost died in. Fabian slaps down a file full of information and Aguefort eats pizza with them and in the piano-bubble, she sleeps—

In the gymnasium, wrenched out of time for twelve hours, she stoops and picks up Penelope’s crown. Someone else takes it and lowers it for her coronation.

The crown is heavy on her head but there's no going back, there's no climbing down, there's just victory ahead and Fig can take it, Fig can take it all. Floor the gas, ring the alarm bells, sound the damn bugles. She never has to talk to anyone again, never has to pretend to be anyone again, doesn’t have to worry about being hated when she’s already reached this level of public adoration; the ruby is shining and red in her hand and the dream takes her far away.

**Author's Note:**

> and fabian breaking that door.... was the catalyst for gilear moving into the seacaster garage....  
> in all seriousness, i had the basic outline of this fic worked out pretty much right after the first episode of sophomore year, but i didn’t bring it all together until now; hope it’s still an enjoyable read. i have a lot of feelings about the bad kids and the sig figs in particular, and i wanted to take a stab at putting together my idea of what could’ve been happening during the time jump in the series. fig if you could like, also work through your problems, i promise it will get better. you are a Teen and it is so hard but i swear it gets easier. also yes i included my fantasy high oc in this i'm not sorry  
> Title for this fic comes from the song Emotional Vagrant off the scary jokes album BURN PYGMALION!!! A Better Guide to Romance, which is just a really good album if you were looking for music to listen to.  
> Let me know what you think! I really love comments and I hope this story was a good read!


End file.
